Welcome to the T&R Institution (Dis Room 11)
by Dayja
Summary: Across all possible universes, surely there is one where the Doctor is just a man; not a time lord, not an alien. But no matter the reality he's born into, there are certain constants that must be upheld. There will always be monsters, and there will always be companions and there will always be a mad man with a box.


**Warnings** : Mental Health Issues, mental institutions. References to various types of abuse (none specifically in this chapter, more specific warnings to be included in the chapter to come). Occasional references to people with mental health issues as 'mad' or similar words (I honestly could not resist using the quote from Doctor Who in the summary, for one, though if it helps, they're the Doctor's words, not mine).

 **Note** : At the moment, I basically have 2-3 chapters planned and half of chapter 2 written; I make no promises on drawing the story out further than that. Which is not to say I don't have a vague sort of notion of how it could be drawn out into quite a long story, just that I know myself and it's better to promise the minimum I know I can deliver than the maximum I potentially might deliver. I'd rather like to avoid adding yet another WIP to my list.

 **Chapter 1**

The door was a calming shade of green, the number three done in black just below the name plate on which the name CLARA OSWALD had been etched.

"Here we are," said the man. "Room 211 of wing 10." Wing 10. As though not calling them wards would change where she was. Her new home until they decided she was sufficiently cured of her crazy to return to the real world. The room was surprisingly pleasant for what it was; it had a proper bed for one. Clara had imagined a tiny white room, like a prison cell, with a tiny spring mattress bed and barred windows and a second bed for whatever roommate she was to be stuck with. The room was small, but the walls were cream not white, and the sole bed in the room was a double and, upon sitting on it, proved to be surprisingly comfortable.

"All the beds use memory foam mattresses," the nurse whose name she had forgotten explained while she sat and ran her hand over the brown comforter, her eyes taking in the chair in the corner and the nightstand and chest of drawers. It looked like a proper bedroom, almost like one might find in a hotel. Everything neutral and pleasant and soulless, ready to conform to whoever visited. She half expected to find complimentary stationary and a minibar disguised as a cupboard. Of course there wasn't one; not in a building that included 'rehabilitation' in its title. Nor was there a phone.

The nurse was well suited to his job; he sounded compassionate without being overbearing or pitying, and he managed to do his job and explain the details of her room to her in a way that didn't quite sound condescending even though it should have, because he was basically talking at her while she looked around and said nothing.

"You should have a map with your orientation packet," the nurse continued, after quickly showing her through to a tiny bathroom and an even tinier closet space. There was a map, along with the basics of what was allowed, what wasn't allowed, non-mandatory activities like art classes that were available, and the somewhat more mandatory therapy sessions. The map showed all the sorts of rooms Clara might have expected in a place like this; cafeteria, art room, quiet rooms. Then there were the less obvious like the game room, library, swimming pool, and atrium. The nurse took special care to point out the nurse stations where she could ask for help if she needed it, "Day or night."

Clara managed to smile at him, to show she understood and hopefully in a way that completely hid the fact that she felt practically paralyzed by fear.

She didn't want to be there. She didn't want to need to be there. She wanted to be at home, curled up next to Danny, grading papers. And she never ever wanted Danny to have that look on his face again, the look that said she was broken, that she was broken and that had broken something inside him.

Finally, the nurse had said all there was to say, and he had accepted Clara's attempt to smile, and he had left her to herself. Alone, she gave herself five minutes. Five minutes to hate the neutral cream colored room, five minutes to hate the way her life had leapt from its perfect path to throw her into a ditch, five minutes to scream into the clean brown pillow, to pound her fists on the relentlessly soft bed, to let out every ounce of frustration and furry and fear.

Then she sat up, went into her new bathroom, and washed her face. She came out, retrieved her suitcase, and she unpacked. The picture of her and Danny went on the nightstand. The comfortable clothes went into the drawers. Her favorite soaps went into the bathroom. And that was it. Her new life was read to begin.

She considered this, very briefly thought about giving herself another five minutes to scream, and instead threw open her door and stepped boldly into the hallway. She had a sort of idea that she might explore the facility, perhaps even meet some of the other inmates.

She was not intending for one such inmate to come hurling down the corridor and slam into her, knocking them both to the ground.

She had a moment to notice that it was a man, a man who looked young but dressed old, with gangly limbs and long floppy hair and strangely innocent eyes that didn't at all match his impish grin. Then the man was hopping to his feet, half looking over his shoulder even as he grabbed her hand to haul her up.

"Hello," he said, and then, "Run." And run he did, just as two men charged around the corner after him. They had the build and attitude of security guards but were dressed like nurses. Clara recognized immediately that the man who had charged into her was some kind of escaped patient, probably one meant to be in a more secure wing. What she was going to do, seeing this, was stand back against the wall and let the two orderlies get on with their duties catching the man, and after they had all gone by she would continue her explorations.

That is fully what she intended to do. Apparently, though, her feet hadn't gotten the message, because instead of calmly stepping out of the way and watching the spectacle go by, she found herself running.

The man was fast, certainly faster than the men chasing him, definitely faster than Clara had attempted to go for a very long time. Her breath was already coming in sharp gasps as she followed him through some double doors, and then, (and how did he find the energy?!) up a flight of stairs, into another hallway, around a corner and the orderlies were far behind, but the patient was too far ahead, she was going to lose him, he was around a corner and…

"This way."

…and then suddenly he wasn't far ahead at all, because he had waited for her around the corner, and it was only as he grabbed her hand and half dragged her through a doorway into a dark room that her brain caught up enough to wonder exactly how stupid she had been. For all she knew, he was completely psychotic and now he intended to kill her.

"Don't worry," said the man, "I'm not going to kill you."

"What?" Clara demanded, suddenly completely sure that this was exactly what the man intended to do.

"You have that look on your face, the 'he's mad and he's going to kill me' look. I'm not going to kill you. This way."

And he waved a stick with a green light on the end, a light too gentle for the stick to be a torch, but still offering enough light for her to recognize that the dark room was in fact a storage closet, and that it had a sort of vent in the back, and it was through there that he wanted them to go.

Clara decided that she probably truly did need to be in this institution because only such a patient would agree to follow the instructions of a possible psychopath to crawl into a dark vent ahead of him.

Unless she actually was having another 'moment' and none of this was happening the way she thought it was.

She crawled into a dark narrow space, nearly banging her head against a pipe, and then the man crowded in behind her, pulling a metal grating in place behind them. He turned off his green not-torch just in time for the closet door to be thrown open, the orderlies finally catching up.

The men searched the closet quickly, looking around the obviously empty closet for just long enough that the dust got to Clara and she had to struggle desperately to hold back a sneeze. In the end, the orderlies completely failed to notice anything off about the vent, and shut the door just as the sneeze finally escaped, leaving them in absolute darkness.

Clara sneezed three times, and then the green light was back, and the strange patient was urging Clara forwards, through the crawl space to a second vent. Then he wriggled in a flailing sort of way, past and, ultimately, over her so that he could do whatever it was he did that made the grating come off so they could climb out.

They came out in another closet, but this one in a hallway on the opposite side of the wall, and so not a place the orderlies were likely to search anytime soon. The patient calmly stood up and switched on the light. Clara stood next to a tower of toilet paper and dusted herself off, feeling dirty and cobwebby and a bit sore and breathless but also, though she could hardly explain why, much calmer than she had felt since she had first learned where she was to be a patient.

"Hello," said the stranger again, "I'm the Doctor."

"I'm Clara Oswald," Clara answered, and she wondered if being a doctor rather than a patient was one of this man's delusions. "Doctor who?" she asked.

"Just the Doctor," the man answered, and then, "Why did you follow me?"

"I…" Clara started to say she had no idea why, but what she ultimately said instead was, "You ran into me. You're supposed to say you're sorry."

"Am I?" he asked, and he completely failed to look at her as though chasing someone down and following them through a wall just to make them apologize for an accident were strange. Instead he smiled, that same impish smile and said with utter sincerity, "I'm sorry."

"It's fine," Clara answered.

The Doctor, or whatever his name was, smiled and then, just before the silence that followed could become awkward said, "Do you want to see my TARDIS?"

"Your what?" Clara asked in return.

"Time and Relative Dimensions in Space," he recited, "It travels through time. And space."

It probably wasn't healthy to feed into the man's delusions. That didn't stop Clara from saying yes.

"This way," the Doctor said, and he boldly left the closet, glanced around the empty hall, and then pulled open what turned out to be a laundry chute and jumped inside. This was probably when Clara should have said, "never mind." Instead, she found herself opening the chute after him and looking down. It was a bit of a drop down but not nearly as dark as the closet vent had been and she could see the Doctor climbing out of what looked like a bin filled with sheets. He looked up at her.

"Come along, Clara," he said, offering her another grin, "Geronimo!" She felt the first real smile she'd had since entering this place stretch across her lips, and before she could remind herself how ridiculous it was, she clamored into the chute and dropped.

The Doctor helped her out of the bin and then kept her hand as they went on, into yet another corridor, and together they walked boldly past a patient shuffling along in a bathrobe. The Doctor pulled her down next to him as they snuck passed a nurse's station, and then at last they came to a pair of double doors leading, according to the letters over it, to wing 11. The doors opened with no difficulty and they entered yet another hallway, this one with dark blue doors.

They didn't have much further to go. The Doctor led them to what had every appearance of being another closet. There wasn't a room label anyway, and the door had a proper keyhole lock which none of the patient rooms had. Then the Doctor pulled a key up from a chain around his neck and turned it in the lock. When he opened the door and it wasn't a closet at all; it was a room. The room was about the size of a patient bedroom, but it had no bathroom or closet. The room itself was windowless and white with…something at its center. The something was a bit like some form of modern art, with bits and pieces of this and that brought together to make something inexplicable but strangely enticing.

"Welcome to the TARDIS," said the Doctor. "I know; it's bigger on the inside."

Well it was, Clara supposed, if one were expecting it to be a closet.

The Doctor went up to the strange art piece at the center of the room and started to mess with it, flipping switches, turning knobs, pressing at what appeared to be a typewriter, turning a wheel. The artwork turned out to be at least part machine because it began to do…something. It made a sort of wheezing noise, lights blinked, and it hummed.

"It's…lovely," Clara managed to say, rather than, as she was thinking: 'do the orderlies and therapists know you've built this?'

"Of course it is," said the Doctor. "And it can take us anywhere you'd like to go in time and space! Anywhere at all! Want to see dinosaurs? I can do dinosaurs." And he flipped more switches, spun a wheel again, and the machine gave a few more wheezes before shutting down.

"Come along, Clara!" he said, and he threw open the room's door.

In spite of herself, Clara actually felt a moment of disappointment when the door proved to open back on the same hallway as before. She watched the Doctor step into the hallway and look around, a look of confusion on his face.

"This isn't the age of the dinosaurs," he said, sounding almost lost. Clara didn't know why, but it felt wrong, suddenly, that reality had let this man down, that it hadn't somehow provided a doorway into a Mesozoic jungle. She felt almost on the verge of tears, instinctively sensing that she was facing a tragedy even if she had yet to comprehend it.

"No," she said, because what else was there to say? There was never going to be dinosaurs on the other side of that door. The man blinked at her.

"Oh," he said, and then, "Well…do you want some tea?"

The orderlies caught up to them while they were sitting in the cafeteria. It wasn't one of the designated meal times so they had the room mostly to themselves, the lights on low. The person working the counter had smiled at them anyway, and hadn't so much as blinked when the Doctor had marched up and demanded high tea. She had smiled almost fondly instead before asking Clara to let her read her wrist ID (to check for food restrictions, the woman had explained, though she hadn't asked the Doctor to read his), and then asking Clara if there was anything in particular she wanted.

"No, thank you…tea if you have it ready," Clara answered, feeling awkward and uncomfortable to be demanding service during what she suspected must be this woman's break time, but the woman had only smiled and gone into the back while the Doctor half dragged Clara over to a table in the corner which he proclaimed to be 'the best' because 'plants!'.

It was actually quite a nice cafeteria; like her bedroom it wasn't what she was expecting. There were white table clothes on the tables, and potted plants about the room, including the two near their table that had so impressed the Doctor.

The woman came back, not with high tea, but with a plate of fish fingers, two bowls of custard, a full pot of tea, a plate of biscuits, and some sort of icy drink with a straw that she stuck in front of the Doctor.

"Banana smoothie," the woman explained briefly to Clara, "I can get you one too, if you prefer. He doesn't actually like tea."

"Nonsense," the Doctor announced, "Tea is a staple to British society and a favorite of time lords." The woman smiled at him, winked towards Clara, and went back to her position behind the counter. The Doctor stubbornly took one of the cups and poured himself some tea. He took a sip, and immediately spit the drink back into the cup.

"Not to your liking?" Clara asked, trying hard not to laugh at the faces he was pulling while she poured her own cup, adding a packet of sugar from the container on the table. The tea proved to be fine. Not brilliant, not horrible, just fine. The Doctor glared at his own cup accusingly, as though his not liking it was the teas fault, while he took a deep gulp from his smoothie.

Then he took up a fish finger and dipped it into his custard. He had eaten half of them while Clara nibbled on a biscuit and began to wonder if she shouldn't be making conversation, and if she did, what would she say (what are you in here for seemed a bit insensitive and wrong, but then so did saying something like 'so what was that about time lords?') when the two orderlies and her own nurse, the one who had showed her to her room, arrived.

They didn't do anything alarming, though, no grabbing them or trying to drag them off in a straightjacket or injecting them with drugs. The orderlies they had run from didn't even look annoyed. They looked a bit pleased, and not in a 'got you at last!' kind of way. They didn't even approach the table but hung back, allowing the nurse to come over to talk to them. Clara had an uncomfortable moment when she thought he might begin to scold her for running about with a patient in need of care, or perhaps to tell her they had rethought her situation and wanted her in a more guarded wing with less freedom to run about and cause trouble, but he only gave her a brief smile before addressing the other man.

"So you decided to eat after all, Doctor?" the nurse said with a smile.

"Rory!" the Doctor said, and then to Clara, "This is Rory Pond. He's a Roman I picked up once in my TARDIS."

"That's not exactly true, now is it, Doctor?" Rory answered, not losing his smile. "It's Rory Williams. And I'm from Leadworth."

"Of course you're a Pond," the Doctor insisted, "You married Amelia."

"And she became Amy Williams," the nurse said.

"No she didn't," the Doctor answered, just as though that had settled the entire manner, and he took another bite from his fish finger. The nurse, who was apparently named Rory Williams, gave up on what was apparently an old argument to turn to Clara again.

"And how are you settling in, Miss Oswald? Making friends, I see?"

"Making friends, exploring, finding my way around," Clara answered.

"Her name is Clara," the Doctor told Rory. "She's Victorian."

And with those words, Clara could feel the blood draining from her face. He didn't know. He couldn't know. They hadn't discussed what had brought Clara to the Therapy and Rehabilitation Institution. He couldn't know.

"If she prefers Clara, she can let me know," the nurse Rory answered, though his eyes were on Clara. He seemed to know something was wrong, if not exactly what. Of course he didn't know; all his notes on her were probably cloaked in ridiculous medical terms.

"Rory and Amy used to be my companions," the Doctor said to Clara, completely oblivious to whatever issues Clara might be experiencing from his words. "Then the Weeping Angels got them and trapped them in a different century, so we don't see each other anymore."

"We were transferred to a different wing," Rory amended.

"You have to keep an eye out for Weeping Angels, Clara," the Doctor announced factually, and completely ignoring Rory's attempts to insert a bit of reality into their conversation. "You can't take your eyes off of them or they will get you. They'll get you, and they'll send you back."

"Back where?" Clara couldn't help but ask, even though she suspected that nurse Rory would rather she didn't feed into his delusions.

"Just back," the Doctor answered, "Back to where your family can't find you, and the doctors can't reach you, and all your potential life is lost. Look out for the Weeping Angels. They're always watching. Fish finger?"

The orderlies waited until the Doctor had finished the fish fingers, both bowls of custards, three biscuits, and his smoothie before they made a move to escort him to his therapy.

"I don't want to," the Doctor answered, sounding as petulant and rebellious as a five year old facing bed time. "I'm talking to Clara. She's my new companion."

"Clara has a meeting now too," Rory intervened. "You don't want to get Clara in trouble, do you?" How that didn't sound condescending, Clara had no idea. It had to be Rory's super power, to speak to everyone like they were children and somehow still sound like he was taking them seriously.

"Fine," the Doctor said. "But I don't like it." And he allowed himself calmly to be led away by the orderlies. Clara watched him go then looked at nurse Rory.

"I have a meeting?" she asked.

"Let's see…running away from orderlies, climbing through vents, jumping down laundry chutes…I think it's time we had a talk, don't you?"

"You know about all that?" Clara asked.

"We do have cameras covering all hallways," Rory answered, but far from sounding stern, his expression was amused. "So…you've met the Doctor. Any regrets?"

Clara thought about this. She was dusty, her knees were sore, her legs would probably regret all that running tomorrow, she suspected she still had cobwebs in her hair, and she had just attempted to eat a fish finger dipped in custard and no, no matter what the Doctor thought, some foods do not go together. She had been almost taken back in time, probably broken half the rules in the institution, and the Doctor had a way of taking her half into his world that probably wasn't remotely healthy, particularly considering why she was there in the first place.

"Not a one."

 **Note** : You know how they always say 'write what you know'? I'm rather bad at that. I'm more likely to write whatever my muse suggests to me, which can take me far outside my own knowledge base. Which is why you may notice this story avoids things like in depth and medical explanations for why the various characters are in the institution. On the other hand, I'm quite good and understanding people, and world building, so there is that. Still, if you notice anything I definitely got wrong about how things work, or if my ignorance leads to me being insensitive, please let me know.


End file.
